For Colored Girls (2010)

For Colored Girls is not a Tyler Perry movie. Sure, it’s listed on his resume as the 10th film he’s written, directed, and/or produced since he first started making movies five years ago. But this adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s 1975 stage play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, is like nothing else from the filmmaker’s melodramatic, overacted and faux-funny oeuvre. For Colored Girls is a beautiful film.

The story centers on a group of loosely interconnected women living in New York, whose lives become more intertwined as various tragedies befall them. Five of the women occupy the same five-story Harlem walk-up apartment building. Crystal (Kimbery Elise) is a mother of two young children by an alcoholic, abusive war veteran. Bartender Tangie (Thandie Newton) lives just across the hall, where she has sex with an endless parade of men to ease her loneliness and broken relationship with her religious-fanatic mother, Alice (Whoopi Goldberg), who lives downstairs with younger daughter Nyla (Tessa Thompson). Nyla has so far been the favored child but loses her virginity and ends up pregnant with no one to turn to except her exuberant dance teacher Yasmine (Anika Noni Rose). Phylicia Rashad, Loretta Devine, Kerry Washington, and Janet Jackson also star respectively as the building’s nosy landlord, a nurse a who runs a neighborhood women’s center, a child social worker who is unable to conceive, and Crystal’s boss, a Miranda Priestley-type figure with a closetful of Prada and a troubled marriage of her own.

The original play consisted of seven poems recited to music and movement on a bare stage by seven female characters, named for the colors of the rainbow. They had no real names because they were intended to represent the universality of experience heralded by feminists of the day. The anonymity and sparseness was part of the story in a “the medium is the message” sort of way.

Perry, who cut his teeth on the modern spectacle-loving Chitlin’-and-Church Theatre Circuit, has never done sparse well. Thankfully, he managed to rein in his tendency toward outlandish, unnecessary showiness. What melodramatic excess there is actually serves the story quite well. The rape of one character–whose unsuccessful fight against her attacker turns into resigned staring at a slowly ticking clock–is interspersed with an aria being watched at the opera by another character who is desperately trying to hold on to her homosexual husband. I normally can’t get on board with any attempt to romanticize or beautify the abject violence of rape, but something about the heightened tension of this scene just worked. The hot tears rolling down my cheeks were the evidence of that.

Also hard at work is the film’s simply superb cast. Veterans Devine and Rashad are consummate professionals, whose line readings of Shange’s original poems get the rhythms and feelings exactly right with effortless grace. I only wish Rashad, whose character is the least fleshed out (she was a Perry add-on) had been given the chance to deliver the “somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff” poem, instead of Devine. Her character’s insistent meddling in the lives of these women would have taken on a fitting air of knowing.

Among the younger members of the cast, Rose (Dreamgirls), Elise (Diary of a Mad Black Woman), and Newton deliver powerhouse performances, while Thompson, the youngest of the bunch, shows remarkable promise. In fact, I’ve never loved and simultaneously loathed Thandie Newton more. This performance is even stronger than the one she gave in the Oscar-winning Crash. And Elise’s portrayal of tacit compliance in her own abuse and her heartbreaking reaction to its almost unwatchable consequence is a testament to her incredible range as an actress.

The weak spots in the performances were Goldberg and Jackson. I’m not sure I understand Perry’s insistence on working with the pop star, aside from her box office draw. He has never been able to draw a particularly deep performance from her. And I wonder what a more skilled thespian, such as Viola Davis, could have brought to the role. But I’m grateful, at least, that the debacle of Mariah Carey’s original casting as Tangie was averted by scheduling conflicts.

But these are minor complaints, as For Colored Girls’ strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. It may have taken 10 films and way too much Madea, but I think Mr. Perry has finally gotten it right.